Recent content in Ingo Richter on Today is Tomorrow's Past
📖 What I’m reading So Good They Can't Ignore You - Cal Newport The Ten Equations That Rule the World - David J. T. Sumpter Make It Stick - Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger, and Mark A. Daniel 📺 What I’m watching Peacemaker Chabos 🧰 What I’m making Developing a small web app to keep track of round based game scores small macOS app to clean up my Desktop periodically.…
Wallpaper Week 22/2025 Howdy I’ve spent last Saturday afternoon riding my bicycle in a bigger loop in the East Bay. For a water and coffee break, I stopped on Alameda . The coffee shop was close to the beach, and I took the opportunity to find a spot on the beach to take some pictures of the bay and San Francisco in the far distance. Since the city was covered in afternoon fog, the whole…
Wallpaper Week 20/2025 Howdy I went for a short hike last weekend in Marin County, CA . We had beautiful weather with temperatures around 70°F and a light breeze that helped during the midday hike. The hike from the parking lot was roughly 1.8 miles and mostly flat. There were other trails going higher over the mountain ridge, but we were not in the mood for climbing.
TL;DR JankyBorders is a tool that allows you to add a colored border around macOS app windows. This is helpful, especially in dark mode, to better see the window border and identify which application window is in front and active. With a simple configuration file, it’s possible to specify the colors for the active and inactive windows. The program has more customizable options than I will discuss…
I’m a US Citizen Now 🇩🇪 + 🇺🇸 TL;DR On July 31, 2023, I received my US Citizenship certificate during the Oath Ceremony at the USCIS Field Office in San Francisco. The whole process from filing BBG to certificate took ~22 Months. There was a delay in the biometrics appointment since I was in Germany for a more extended period. I now have German and US Citizenship and can freely roam…
It’s already May Woah, we have already surpassed the four-month mark for this year. A lot of things have happened in the last four months. In January, I was reassigned to my new team. Now, I’m working on our products’ Share and Review functionality. I’m back to Web Development + plus a little bit of UXP (proprietary Tech) that enables us to target our Desktop Apps with the…
Enable extensions for dayjs I was working on a small project to sharpen my Javascript and Typescript skills. Nothing fancy. The project deals with data calculations, and I was looking for a modern replacement of momentjs. I found dayjs , which seemed to be a suitable replacement. As I mentioned, I had to find the number of days between the two dates. The documentation of dayjs mentioned a method…
Kicking Nextcloud Cron Script from TrueNAS Cron Job Tl;DR I’m running TrueCharts Nextcloud in my TrueNAS SCALE at home. After the setup, I discovered that none of the cron jobs was running. I’m using the Nextcloud News App and never saw any new stories. I didn’t find a way to make the Nextcloud cron work, so I decided to have a cron job that runs every hour to kick the Nextclodu…
The Fediverse I was never an active user of Twitter. Occasionally, I was browsing my feed. I follow the #genart posts and read about technology. My occasional post about some lesser important topic, the link to a blog post I wrote, or a retweet about something I believed to be interesting. I never ended up in a heated discussion about any crap with random people. I have a pretty dull social media…
13 Months… … after filing the application to keep my German citizenship, I got an email today, letting me know that my application was accepted, and I was granted the permission to retain my German citizenship when applying for the US citizenship. Yes 🤘! Now, I need to make an appointment to pick up my certificate from the German Consulate in San Francisco. And then start the N-400…
WFH Day 946 I had some random thoughts the other day. The invention of Smartphones and the evolution of built-in cameras was a big step forward in reducing friction to asking random people at scenic spots to take a picture of yourself. Do you remember the days you had to instruct people how to use the camera? How to focus, and which button to press before taking a picture? All this instructional…
WFH Day 896 I’m working on too many things at once. The most important one is to replace my Synology NAS with a new one that I built from scratch. My friend was always telling me how great and reliable his TrueNAS system is working for him. Now, I’m replacing my Synology NAS with a more powerful TrueNAS system with a more powerful CPU, RAM and Storage. It’s a steep learning curve…
WFH Day 870 Long time no update. I was pretty occupied at work getting some larger projects off the ground. The projects are currently in midair and need only occasional course adjustments to arrive at their final destination in the next three months. My employer is thankfully shutting down the offices in the US for the 4th of July week. Everybody is out of the office and getting some prescribed…
A Better Fan Shroud I already updated my 3D Printer fan shroud a couple of months ago. It should cool the filament more effectively and evenly. I think it did a good job. Unfortunately, the shroud got too hot several times and was deformed. I was afraid that it now had reduced cooling performance. I found an update to the fan shroud that looked very efficient, and somebody analyzed the airflow,…
Well, Crap, what a waste of time One would guess that I should have known better with the work experience I accumulated in the software engineering field. But, it’s Friday evening, after our social team meeting, and I am still excited to finish something substantial for this feature that I’m working. Lots of moving parts, refactored code, loose ends, and hastily glued together code…
Stepping into the Void Friday, May 6th, is the first time since the start of the Pandemic that I stepped inside our office. This time in San Jose. We wanted to celebrate a milestone with our team. The office was empty, and I saw only a handful of people. It was great to see my team and have lunch with them. Driving to the office sucked. As expected. Too many cars on the road, and the traffic in…
Global Day Off Thanks to my employer, I had an additional Day Off. To take care of myself and spend time away from my Computer. That clearly didn’t work out as planned. I didn’t stay away from my Computer. I had to clean up some mess I created on my work machine. Open browser tabs accumulated and I need to save some of them for later reference, some emails I put off for some time and…
WFH Day 761 Thanks to my employer, I had an additional Day Off. To take care of myself and spend time away from my Computer. I went out for a hike up Mission Peak in Fremont, California. I heard about it and wanted to do it for quite some time. It was a great adventure. It was challenging, and I was tired like hell afterward. I got a sunburn on my face. Not great.
Designing a Spacer for my AxiDraw Plotter I have an AxiDraw V3/A3 Penplotter that I bought to satisfy a desire to own such a fantastic machine. It started in my teen years working with HP Plotters in our university lab at the TUHH . I could not afford an HP Plotter back in the day, so that desire was never satisfied.
WFH Day 744 It’s a whole week now since we can’t use any water in the house due to a clogged sewage pipe between the property and the main sewer pipe. That clogged pipe led to a flooding of the bathroom in the basement. Bad experience… Several plumbing companies showed up and couldn’t resolve the problem. Some broke their machines snaking through the pipe. That…
WFH Day 736 I’m currently reading Out of Office - The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home and I have a couple of pages left before this loan expires. It’s a fascinating book about what happens to the office and what other effects those changes will bring for cities and communities in general. There is a lot to think about in the future. And what defines the people that…
TL;DR Adding Swift Code to Objective-C Project Ensure your Swift class derives direct or indirect from NSObject Ensure your Swift class is public to ensure the YourProjectName-Swift.h header generation Prefix the class to expose it to Objective-C. Any Property or method needs its own @objc annotation to be visible from Objective-C. Use the @objcMembers annotation to expose all properties and…
WFH Day 702 Well, well, well, I surpassed the 700 days since I started counting the WFH days in March 2020. That’s a long time ago, and a lot has changed in the meantime. Quality of life is better than before. No 3-hour daily commute in sticky and filthy trains, no more coffee shop visits after work, more time for reading, better-equipped work environment, not meeting some of my dearest…
The Gatekeeper Before I forget what I learned today, I better write it down. Gatekeeper on macOS ensures that properly signed and authentic apps and other executable files, including dylibs and kexts, are executed on your Mac. But if you want to execute an open-source tool installed by brew or some other way on your machine, you will usually see something like this confirmation dialog. In this…
WFH Day 693 I’m back in California for a week now, and my Jetlag is finally gone. Every time I travel to Germany, it feels like it’ll take longer to recover. And this week, I had a lot of meetings and tons of work to finish our development sprint. Not great, but I punched through it.
TL;DR Hugo ’s file lookup magic was biting me and was causing the 3rd party template to use a file with the same name from my blog assets directory. How to waste lots of hours I use Hugo for my Blog with a custom theme hugo future imperfect slim . I made some customizations to my blog a while ago. I added baguetteBox.js for better image galleries and lazySizes to better support different…
SwiftUI - Learn by doing I briefly started to use SwiftUI in 2021. I wanted to learn about the fundamentals and how SwiftUI differs from the traditional iOS and macOS development frameworks. Over the next couple of weeks, I will provide tutorials to help others learn SwiftUI by building some apps. I’m going to start building a Minesweeper clone. Minesweeper is a simple game that I loved to…
WFH Day 657 Happy New Year! I hope you all had a great party to start the new year. Let’s all hope that we stay healthy and safe given the uncertainty of the still ongoing pandemic. New year, new beginnings. Everything is possible, and I’m looking forward to some exciting times. I still have the company-provided sabbatical that I must take this year (it will expire otherwise).…
Happy Thanksgiving I wish everybody a great day with their families and friends. I hope you can all meet in person and make up for last year. I’m grateful for having a family and friends, a roof over my head, and a fulfilling job. Happy Turkey Day, or whatever suits your mood. Stay safe wherever you are and get some time for yourself.
WFH Day 616 I spent four weeks in Germany with my wife and some of my children. Part of the time, I had some PTO and was able to meet with friends and family. The remaining time I was either working or renovating the new place for my wife. Usually working at my desk using my brain, it was a welcome change of pace to work with my hands and do more manual labor tasks. After seven consecutive days of…
Reorg Time I use Nextclouds image upload feature to backup all photos from my phone. I recently discovered that you could upload pictures from your phone into subfolders in the YEAR/MONTH/DAY/picturefile format. After switching this feature on, I realized that all my previously uploaded 3000+ images and short videos lie flat in the Pictures folder. I needed a solution to organize all existing…
WFH Day 438 I get it. We are all waiting for the pandemic to be over. Everybody wants their normal pre-pandemic life back. But will this be possible? What exactly do we mean by saying that? What do we consider normal life? Meeting with friends in person? Meeting anybody in person? Being able to leave your face mask at home? Getting rid of all the restrictions is probably the most important thing…
WFH Day 421 I got up this morning by 6 am, jumped into my running gear, and headed outside by 6:30 am for a short 2 miles run. It was exhausting, and I was slow. But what’s more important: I did it anyway! It took me 24m and 28s. Slow as hell, but I need to start somewhere to get better. This is a start.
WFH Day 414 Unbelievable, but it’s already May of 2021! Time flies like crazy, and we are in month 15 of the pandemic. It looks like the US is speeding up things a lot, and people get vaccinated in large quantities. I got my vaccine three weeks ago. This upcoming Thursday, I’ll receive my 2nd shot, and then I should be fully vaccinated two weeks later. The situation is not so great in…
WFH Day 365 I took some time during the weekend to minimize my belongings. What does that mean? I got rid of some redundant electronics in the Garage. I threw out some old clothes that clogged my closet. I organized my 3D Printer setup and reduced duplicate tools, and put the wanted stuff in some boxes to keep some order. I trashed some boxes with stuff that I didn’t even remember made it…
WFH Day 353 I didn’t sleep too bad last night. I got up at around 7:15 am, made myself a coffee, and continued to read my current book Gerta . I’m a slow reader, and if I don’t put time aside for reading, I will never finish any longer book in a finite amount of time. Reading in bed at night is something that doesn’t work for me. I usually fall asleep pretty quickly, and…
WFH Day 350 It’s already the last day of a perfect month. Perfect in that sense that the month started with a Monday and ended adequately on a Sunday. :-) I mentioned in my post that I was about to create my sourdough starter. It was an experiment, and I failed it. I assume that I didn’t have the right place in my house with sufficient constant temperature (this house is so badly…
WFH Day 340 During my lunch break, I took a walk and visited my friends who own a coffee shop in our town. Yesterday, they told me that they would get their vaccination today. I was amazed to hear that since my healthcare provider is sending me weekly updates about the actual vaccination progress and that they vaccinate people over 75. It looks like I still have to wait a bit longer since they…